Drowning By Stanzas
by Dearest's Historic Cadre
Summary: The contents of a wrecked ship turn out to hold a female, whose throat Davy Jones quickly has slit. Unfortunately, she will insist on turning up in his dreams, drenched to the skin and clutching the first book of Horatian Odes. Casual readers beware.
1. uninteresting death

It was a dark and stormy night. Obviously.

In the narrative's defence, however, the dark was especially oily, twisting and full of thunderous roars and the echoes of long-dead screams, and the storm was vituperative and lashing in a way weather had no right to be. It was the perfect weather for a shipwreck. It was perfect weather for the taking of prisoners aboard _The Flying Dutchman_. It was perfect weather for some atrocity against the human spirit- ah, the usual crimes that keep immortals busy in their chains of years and sorrows.

Davy Jones, dread captain, kraken-master, jaded lover, unholy immortal, surveyed the straggling remains of the crew of the _Brumufleygur_, which he vaguely recognised as an Icelandic name. Like kicked animals, the men whimpered nervously away from his gaze, the heavy rain leaving white scars through the filth and blood encrusting their faces.

He enjoyed these little moments, _mano a mano_. He picked the man who looked like he had the most to regret (the eyes had rolled back in the hapless head, revealing stained and bloodshot whites, and the choked beginnings of prayer could barely sputter past his shaking lips), and began the set piece.

"Do you fear death?"

The man gagged and tried to focus on the eyes and not the tentacles. "Y-y-yessir," he managed. A small scream occured somewhere in his Adam's apple as Davy Jones took a luxurious draw on his pipe.

"I can offer you... an escape."

He strolled up and down the line, at ease, almost smiling. Until he came to the end of the line, where he stopped short, snarled grotesquely and twitched his head several times back and forth between his crew and the hunched, damp figure in front of him.

"A woman, bigod!" he roared, sending barnacle-laden crew and soaked prisoners alike reeling. "Get it off my boat!"

There was a dull flash of silver and, before the female could even scream, her jugular vein had been severed and she was thrown into the water.


	2. honeygold hair

Even captains who have made pacts with Lucifer and rule the ocean with a merciless claw need beauty sleep occasionally. Davy Jones usually fell asleep in front of his organ, exhausted by the emotion he'd thrown into playing it.

He dreamt something damp and sinuous crawled out of one of the pipes, dragged itself over and laid its dripping head on his lap. Its tendrils of wet hair fell like a blindfold across the face, which somehow made it more terrifying. At this point he was not aware he dreamt and in his dream he started. In waking life, he would have swiftly drawn his sword and killed it before he knew what it was, but in dreams all things are possible and all dreamers are helpless before the possibilities.

It sat up properly and Davy Jones saw it was a woman- to be precise, the woman he'd had killed earlier that monstrous night, and to be more precise it turned out she was a girl. She could not have been more than fourteen and a half, and there was a certain quality to her exposed white wrists and ankles, visible beneath her sodden dress, that suggested she had recently endured a growth spurt, a quality that could be likened to joints kept in protective shackles for countless years then suddenly freed, unprotected. He also saw she had very strongly defined cheekbones that changed the contour of her head into something triangular, and her eyes were very wide and a misty, uncompromising gray, set far apart in her head. Cheekbones and eyes combined gave her a perturbing resemblance to his hammerhead first mate, and initially he was a little worried he had put to death some relative of said sailor, but he looked closer and saw that the girl had a fine film of freckles totally covering her skin, and concluded they could not possibly be related. He finally noted a thick red line running across her throat, which still seeping fresh blood occasionally into the hollow of her clavicle. It was then he realised he was dreaming, and he seemed to relax.

Some time appeared to pass. Davy Jones realised the girl had asked a question, though he could not remember hearing her voice. Her accent arrived in his short-term memory as entirely neutral.

She repeated herself. "What is your name?"

All tentacles curled into angry shapes. He narrowed his eyes. "I am the sea," he hissed.

She shrugged. "Are you classically trained, Mr The Sea?"

"What!" he thundered more than asked.

"I take that to be a no." She reached inside her dress and extracted a book, which sea-water and blood had destroyed beyond hope of repair. "Horace," she said, waving it. "A Roman lyric poet. This is his first book of Odes."

"I care not for the simperings of a dead man who knew more about metre than he did about life," spat Davy Jones.

"You should listen carefully," she replied calmly, "and I'll read to you the English translation of Ode 5, since the Latin won't be anything but garbled goobledegook to you."

Before he could interrupt her a second time, she began to read aloud in a deeply thrilling voice that could no way belong to her:

"_What slim boy, drenched in liquid perfumes, embraces you, Pyrrha, amongst many roses deep inside your welcoming grotto? For whom do you, simple in elegance, tie up your honey-gold hair?"_

She stopped. "That is the first verse," she said. "Discuss."

Davy did not answer for some time. There was a strange silence in the darkness, devoid even of the cruel whisper of the sea. When he did answer, it was at a resigned mutter: "Damn yer corpse and the clothes on its back."

She waited. Her shoulders jumped with childish impatience but her eyes were disturbingly tranquil.

Finally he said, "I thought this wouldn't be another dream about... her."

"Her?" the girl said, like a fish leaping onto the hook, quick as a flash.

"Honey-gold hair," Davy said glumly. "Beautiful, beautiful strands, like the hangman's noose. And roses." He shuddered deeply, every tentacle writhing. "She- she liked roses."

"You were a slim boy," the girl suggested, but Davy had clammed up, lost in some reverie that sent his smooth, slimy face twitching.

The girl lay a white, wet hand on his claw. He barely seemed to notice, though he did not push her away. The girl asked him, with hypnotic monotony, "What is your name?"

Oh no, he thought, please, don't tell me we're going to start from the beginning.

"Davy Jones," he said, to break the cycle.

"Ah," she said, a smile suddenly flooding her cold countenance. "Welsh, are you?"

Before he could snap at her, the sleep fled from his mind, the scene dissolved and he awoke again in the perfect darkness of misery.


	3. the sea

He was prepared when she arrived the next night. He nodded to her coldly, and said, "I expect yer want to read me yer next verse?"

"It's good for you," she promised, with a new impish look to her face. It seemed to Davy she was changing before his eyes, one minutes shark, the next minnow. With difficultly did he keep the stigma of her gender in mind- she was more creature than woman.

She opened the ruined book, but did not begin immediately. Instead she said, "Why do you keep collecting souls? Haven't you got enough men to man the _Dutchman_?"

Davy stretched like a hunting octopus. "It passes the time," he murmured, "and misery loves company. The day I can make someone suffer as much as I have," and here his features stretched into a smile, "well, I might consider putting the ticker back in place."

She nodded- he noticed that the wound on her throat made this a particularly floppy process- and glanced at the obliterated verses. He suspected, or knew, that she had the poem off by heart.

"You remember we left off with Pyrrha making love to a slim boy?" she said, suddenly neutral again. Davy barely inclined his head. The use of the phrase 'off by heart', which had turned up so naturally in his head, was making him feel uncomfortable. For the first time in years, he felt the cavity in his chest keenly.

She continued in the thrilling voice. _"Alas, how often he will weep at changed fates and changed gods and, young in his understanding, be amazed at the sea made rough by dark winds."_

Beside his elbow, the music box started to play. She looked surprised, which he noted with passive satisfaction, and slithered closer. Despite the hours that had passed since her death, she was still soaked to the skin and dripped freezing water onto his thigh.

"It's cold at the bottom of the sea, and always wet," she said, reading his mind in the way dreams could.

"It's safe, though," Davy said, quietly. "Safe and black and empty."

"Like a womb," the girl said.

"No! Not like a womb!" Davy shouted, spraying her with sticky spit. "Not- not like any womb. Not so disgusting, It's pure there- pure and crushing. It has no mercy. I have no mercy!" he howled.

He thrust his face close to hers, thrust it closer when she did not draw back. "See these eyes?" he snarled. "Do yer see 'em? They are blue- the blue of the sea. The sea is all I see- I am the sea! I see- I am the sea... yer see? I- am- the- sea."

He slumped back, exhausted and tongue-tied. A few tentacles slipped across the ever-moist keys of his organ and played a hideous chord. In the ensuing quiet, the music box's tune seemed to take up the world. Then it wound to a halt, and the silence was suddenly pregnant.

She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, apparently in preparation. "They are periwinkle blue," she said simply. "That is a kind of flower."

He stared at her, too shocked to be angry.

"Women," she continued, "now, women are a real sea. A real _swamp_." She grinned. "Not navigable."

"Even the best sailors know that," he said, absently. "Yer have no stars to sail by. None except what the bright eyes tell you. And even the fakest of crocodile tears cloud that over." He stirred, suddenly restless.

"Savage, dark, greedy, ruthless, fascinating." She reeled off the list like a fastidious thesaurus compiler. "Every woman has it in her to be the sea."

Davy Jones waited for the dream to end at this point. But for a good five minutes, unbearable silence was endured, she looking over the page that would have held the poem, he rocking back and forth, wanting to create noise, wanting to hear the crash of a storm, wanting to shake the girl back and forth until her head fell off. He awoke, cried out, and vowed to exhaust himself today with misdeeds and murders, so he could not dream that night.


	4. credibility and reliability

He did not attempt to play his organ that night. The music box was too close by. Instead he vigorously set about carving up the barnacles that were threatening to destroy the pipes of the organ. It was fantastically boring, backbreaking work, the sort he usually got new recruits to the crew to suffer. He promised himself to make a habit of it.

When he slumped to a gratified, helpless sleep (in a bed draped with sea-slime, rotting beneath his prone body), he was sure he'd hear no young, bland voice, and no beautiful purr of ancient poetry.

He thought it was the sudden quiet that woke him- a sailor grows used to the coaxing mumbles of the sea. He twitched as rapidly as a moth under flame, almost unable to think above the cavern of silence. By ticks and shudders, he threw himself upright, rather hindered by the fact the girl was sitting on his feet. He had not awoken- he had been pulled inexorably into the dream-cabin.

She was watching him with a slight smile on her face. Her skin had lost its film of freckles, and indeed looked as if it was slowly peeling away, making her resemble the hammerhead first mate Maccus more than ever. An image of her, rotting and swollen on the sea-bed, passed across his mind, and he stared hungrily at the translucent sheen of the bones through her skin. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps she'll stop reading once she's decomposed far enough.

"Won't happen," she interrupted. "After all, I'm _your_ dream. Ask me my name."

Grateful she had not begun with more Pyrrha, Davy eagerly complied, leaning across his bed to demand quickly, "What is yer name?"

"Frances," she said, without hesitation.

"I always liked that name," Davy said. Had it been the waking world, he would have made a great show of being aghast but for some reason it just seemed to slot into place, like a slight change of focus that turns the knotholes on a bedroom door to a face, a host of faces, a waiting figure with a hundred limbs. "I would have named- it's a good name," he hastily amended.

"Isn't it," she said softly, her face sliding down the cool, tranquil expression again. "Let's leave the subject for now." Before he could stop her, she opened the book and her throat and started afresh with the third verse.

"_He, the credible, who now relishes you, golden one, who believes you will always be available, always loveable."_

"She said she would be!" Davy burst out, whilst the words were still fading away. Frances gave him a cold look that, because it could not pierce his heart, emptied its emotionless scorn in his chest and let it lie there, and finished the verse.

"_He is unaware of the treacherous breeze. Unhappy are those for whom you sparkle, untried."_

The lack of noise returned and swaddled them both.

In the minutes that followed, Davy struggled to build up to speech. Frances' gray eyes held no mercy and no malice, and somehow this made them harder to talk to. It was like- no, he realised, it _was_- looking in a mirror. When he could speak, he felt too raw to talk about what she had just read. So he said, "Yer name isn't Frances, aye?"

"No," she agreed. "But you always liked that name, and this is _your_ mindscape. Sorry," she added, a scrap of sympathy appearing in the face.

"What is yer real name?" Davy asked her, curiously.

She smiled, very sadly. It was the realest emotion he had ever seen her face display. "How can I tell you that? You killed me before you knew. Therefore, you can never know. I'm just a dream."

This seemed abominably unfair to Davy, and he was filled with regret and remorse to such an extent he lost sight of her for a moment, because of a film of tears.

"You were a slim, credible boy."

"A man," he corrected. "But she made me child-like. And I- I thought because of that, she would have been as kind as a mother should be. I should have known better. Beautiful women," he spat, "don't need to be."

At this point things dissolved, and he panicked, because he knew the dream was ending and he wanted someone to talk to. "There's more!" he said hastily, but it came out mewling and the vowels seemed to sink to the floor before he could get them out of his lips. And he wanted to ask the girl, "If you're a dream, how come yer can read me a poem I've never heard of?"

She must have heard his intent. "Some things are more real than others." When he awoke into the soft, terrible bustle of wakefulness, he realised that was not a real answer.


	5. the last verse

Sleep could not come soon enough. Davy Jones spent the day crueller than usual, unleashing the kraken twice in one day on two separate ships. It was a while since he'd called the beast at all, and as it rose from the waves in a stinking curl, he felt a bitter, hateful power surge through his ravaged body. The sick fury renewed him to his very toes and tips of tentacles. He'd never felt so alive as when he watched death and fear in others by his hand. Not since- but that memory was locked in a chest where it should be.

When he shut his eyes to sleep, however, he was uncomfortably clutched by small fists of guilt. They dispersed quickly and left no marks but he wondered where they came from.

"Murderer," said the girl humorously by his ear.

He snorted, amphibian-like. He had not been aware of the passage from sleep into dream, though now he cocked an ear, the silence seemed to wring the air out. Surely there was no such silence on the waking earth?

To spite him, the music box juddered, played a few notes, and wound down very suddenly.

"The sea-monster today was... unnecessary."

He sat bolt upright. "They need to know to _fear_ me. I do not compromise! I do not forgive! I do not- I do not do things by half. I. Am. The. Sea. I am always powerful."

She jumped straight in, sending him mentally reeling. _"The sacred tablet on the wall shows I have hung up my dripping clothes for a god who has power over the seas."_

Davy stared.

She shut the book with a wet 'squelch' and it fell to pieces. "Finished," she added, unnecessarily.

Davy stared.

"Like I said," she continued, ignoring him, "every woman is a sea to herself. And she tried to drown you, but you swam away. And you hung up your courting cloths and you climbed into that awful set of weeds, and you sailed the ocean and you got your own theme tune." She grinned, mockingly.

Davy stared.

"I suppose the discerning and intelligent reader of this little bedtime drama," she said idly, "could draw parallels between your heart and the sacred sacrificial tablet. Well, good luck to them. I just wanted to let you know of... this."

Davy stared.

He said, in a voice he was not sure was his, "I wasn't sure if it was my child."

She waited, glassy again.

"She wasn't always mine, see? I tried to ignore that. In my head she was mother and lover combined. She was just a particularly beautiful whore. But I loved her. Properly. And she said we'd elope together, then later told me I'd paid her to say such things, then told me she said it from the heart, then-" He broke off. "In the end, I couldn't tell when she was telling the truth. I sailed away. I wrote letters. I tried to make myself hard at heart. Hearts don't do that. I came back six months later and she was pregnant. I didn't understand a word that came out of her clever, clever mouth. I couldn't, she twisted meanings and bent sentence double with her tirades and her tears. When the thing was born, I drowned it because I was afraid it would never know me, or worse, call me Papa. My heart was soft and difficult, so I got rid of it. She withered and died soon after the birth. I stayed alive. But- O God! I still loved her."

He looked up. At first he thought she was crying, then he realised her entire body was dissipating into salt water.

"Wait!" he exclaimed, not sure why.

Her voice came to him like the distant crash of waves on the shore. "By telling me your soul, Mr The Sea, you've set me free. I can... rest now."

"But you said you were just part of my dream," he said, perplexed.

"Isn't... this all... part of one... nightmare?" Words were difficult because her mouth had faded, like a perverse and poignant Cheshire cat. "You... needed... to...dream...me. I needed... the sea to... let me go. I was... destined to... die... on... land..."

"I still need yer," he whispered. "Yer- yer a good subconscious. I need one of those sometimes."

But she'd gone, and she wasn't coming back.

When he awoke, the sound of water had returned, lapping hungrily at the sides of the ship. He fought the temptation to raise what were once his hands to his ears, to shut out the din of living and hear his own mind in the silence, the silence, the silence which wasn't coming back.


End file.
